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CHAPTER FOUR

War by Citizen Soldiers

THE MAKINGS OF AN ARMY

In Connecticut’s 26th Regiment, the men of Company I took their orders from Captain Bentley, an ice dealer. A bookbinder, assisted by a train conductor, commanded the 25th Regiment’s Company K. In the 2nd Heavy Artillery, men in their forties answered to an eighteen-year-old student, Lt. Augustus Fenn. In the ranks were lace weavers, oystermen, bartenders, and factory workers. How in the world could Abraham Lincoln hope to win a war with an army like this?

Just a few weeks after the war began, a Hartford doctor named George Clary had observed: “all sorts and conditions of men are enlisting here … A company is this moment marching by my windows. Some of the recruits are stout, hardy farmer boys from the country and then there are clerks from the counter, young lawyers, and Gentlemen’s sons forming companies by themselves and then foreigners of all descriptions—some thirsting for fame, some for whiskey, and some for nothing but $11.00 per month.”¹

Would this odd jumble—hundreds of thousands of untrained men led by a tiny percentage of West Point professionals—fight? “‘War,’ said a great statesman, ‘can only be successfully prosecuted when the army is well seasoned … the raw recruits who have responded to President Lincoln’s call will only hasten the downfall of the Republic by their inefficiency on the field.’”²

Untrained, yes; but Lincoln’s raw recruits were for the most part united in the cause and willing to give their lives for their country. A New Haven bookkeeper-turned-soldier put it simply: “The experiment was to be tried of … a war by citizen soldiers who left the desk, the farm and the workshop in answer to their country’s call.”³

Smooth-cheeked boys marched beside white-bearded grandfathers. A soldier in the 21st Connecticut wrote of their oldest member: “the boys wondered why the Army had sent them a Chaplain who was three times as old as most of them, 64. He could never in the world, they thought, stand the rigors of camp life, much less the stress of battle.”⁴

The 2nd Heavy Artillery’s “most unpromising officer,” wrote one of the men, “was First Lieutenant Augustus H. Fenn. He was but eighteen years old, of freckled face and awkward gait, and was regarded with surly contempt by windy and consequential brother officers. Every private soldier, too, had his fling at him. It was considered very impudent in him to be an officer, at all; but he had recruited his forty men, and there he was, with a commission in his pocket from Governor Buckingham.” (Theodore F. Vaill, History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery. Originally the Nineteenth Connecticut Vols., p. 334.)

Fenn’s company contained the men rejected by the officers of the other nine companies. But though young and inexperienced, Fenn was not a quitter. The regiment’s adjutant wrote that “Lieutenant Fenn grew in the estimation … of all who knew him … He proved himself one of the best drill masters and disciplinarians in the regiment, and one of the most competent officers in every position.” His company of disdained soldiers became “one of the best, most faithful, trusted Companies that ever went into the service.” (Ibid., p. 334.)

At the Battle of Cedar Creek, Fenn (then a captain) was wounded in the arm. Surgeons amputated it at the shoulder, and arranged for the young officer to be discharged from the army. Indignant, Fenn appealed to his colonel who allowed him to stay in the regiment. Less than seven weeks after his amputation, Captain Fenn returned to his troops at the front. By war’s end, Augustus Fenn, no longer the “most unpromising officer,” had been brevetted colonel. One-armed, he returned to his home in Plymouth, Connecticut. He went on to attend Harvard Law School, later becoming a respected judge in Connecticut.

Chaplain Thomas Brown, sixty-four, “won the respect and love of the entire regiment.”(Story of the 21st Regiment, Connecticut Volunteer Infantry During the Civil War, by members of the regiment, p. 127.)

Years after the war ended, Reverend Brown attended a regimental reunion, at which the veterans presented him with a gold-headed cane. “His deep emotions compelled him to make only a brief reply: ‘I don’t see what I have ever done that you boys love me so.’” (Carl F. Price, Postscripts to a Yankee Township, p. 156.)

But the 21st soldiers soon grew to love their chaplain, Rev. Thomas G. Brown of Chatham. He was a quiet, unpretentious man, “doing all that was possible for the physical, as well as the spiritual, well being of even the most humble man in the regiment.”⁵

In May of 1864, when the regiment went into battle at Drewry’s Bluff, its chaplain went in with them.

Our sturdy old chaplain, anxious to render practical aid, armed himself with an axe and found a short method of opening ammunition boxes, from which he distributed cartridges … Death was thinning our ranks and anon the good Chaplain … was beckoned to the side of a dying soldier …

And down on bended knees by the dying man’s side sank the fearless minister, and with bared head, looking up to Heaven, lifted his soul in prayer that God would receive the departing spirit. Meanwhile the air was alive with leaden hail, and the roar at times drowned the firmly spoken words of him that prayed.⁶

An unknown photographer captured the likenesses of two boys in Connecticut’s 2nd Heavy Artillery, who posed in their musicians’ uniforms. Dick Butler (left) was about thirteen and Henry VanDeusen about fifteen when they enlisted in December of 1863. For such youngsters, it must have seemed like a dream come true to join the army. Camping in tents, foregoing school and church, and being free from a parent’s oversight—what could be better? But along with adventure and freedom came responsibilities, deprivation, and danger. The drummer boys grew up fast—if they lived to grow up at all. Dick Butler and Henry VanDeusen survived the war.

In battle, musicians didn’t usually bear arms, but they still came under fire while working as stretcher-bearers for the wounded. The 2nd Heavies’ adjutant described what happened to one of their drummer boys at the Battle of Cold Harbor: “two men were carried to the rear, on stretchers, apparently in such a state of exhaustion that they could not stand … they were carried by some of the musicians,—whose duty it was to perform such work when fighting was going on—and placed in a ravine, about a mile to the rear; they had just arrived there when a rebel shell burst near the spot, taking off the foot of a drummer boy of Company E, named Frederick D. Painter.” (Vaill, History of the Second Connecticut Volunteer Heavy Artillery, p. 324.) The son of an itinerant minister, Frederick “Frank” Painter came from a large family. He was about fourteen when he enlisted. The shell at Cold Harbor killed him, and he was buried on the field. At the Battle of Winchester, another drummer in his regiment, James VanBuren, met the same fate.

“He was our father, we his boys,” wrote one of the 21st soldiers.⁷

At the other end of the spectrum from Chaplain Brown were the boy soldiers—and there were many. Fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys (who claimed to be eighteen) enlisted throughout Connecticut. An old story claimed that boys often placed in one of their shoes a scrap of paper with the numeral eighteen written on it. When asked their age, they would reply truthfully that they were “over eighteen.” The doctors who examined the new soldiers often knew or suspected their deceptions, but were willing to look the other way.

Drummer boys were often a regiment’s youngest members. In the 2nd Heavy Artillery, Theodore Vaill mentioned “eight or ten boys, not more than thirteen or fifteen years of age, who had enlisted and come to the regiment with the rest of the recruits, as drummer boys.”⁸ At such a young age, the drummers probably didn’t enlist out of patriotic or moral sentiments, but from a yearning for adventure, or an innocent desire to be a soldier.

In between the young drummers and the old men were thousands and thousands of soldiers whose ages spanned decades. Some Connecticut families sent more than one generation: in Salisbury, fifteen-year-old Charlie Ball fought for the 2nd Heavy Artillery, while his father and his grandfather enlisted the 28th Regiment.

Elihu Moulthrop and his son Evelyn were among many father-son combinations in the Union army. Elihu was forty-four and Evelyn twenty-one when they enlisted in Connecticut’s 20th Regiment. In August of 1864, Evelyn was killed at Turner’s Ford, Georgia—not in battle, but in a peculiar mishap in camp. Evelyn had just come in off picket duty when a neighbor from Derby, Scott Baker, asked for his help. Baker had a musket ball stuck in his gun. Using a ball screw on the end of his ramrod, Baker had screwed it into the jammed bullet. He asked to borrow the strap from Evelyn’s knapsack to fasten to the ramrod. Baker said he intended to attach the strap’s other end to a tree, but Evelyn said “that he would pull out the ball, and he took hold of the strap, and I hold of the breech of the gun, and he gave a sudden pull, and by some unaccountable cause the powder exploded, and the ramrod entered one side of his body, passing through it, and could not be removed from his body except by being filed in two.” (Statement of Scott Baker of Derby, Connecticut, October 30, 1872, in pension file of Evelyn Moulthrop, 20th Connecticut Volunteers, National Archives.)

Evelyn lived only until the next night. At war’s end, his father returned to Connecticut alone; “for ten years he was the worse for Liquor,” wrote his daughter Antoinette. (Statement of Mrs. R. Y. Stevenson of Ansonia, January 21, 1886, in pension file of Evelyn Moulthrop, 20th Connecticut Volunteers, National Archives.)

The majority of Connecticut soldiers were able to read and write, thanks to an 1838 state law that had improved public education. Their schooling ensured that most could write letters home, and record events in their diaries, preserving their thoughts and experiences.

College-educated men were not unusual, especially among the officers, some of whom were quite cultured and literary. Captain John Griswold, a Yale graduate, recited a Horace poem in ancient Greek as he lay dying from his wounds at Antietam.⁹

In the ranks, though, few men could claim such lofty scholarship. A small percentage of Connecticut soldiers (some of them immigrants, some native Nutmeggers) were actually illiterate, or nearly so. Still, the fact that a well digger couldn’t speak eloquently about duty and honor did not make his devotion to his country any less than Captain Griswold’s. “Some were scholars; some were farmers; some were artisans or laborers—plain men who had never heard of Thermopylae or Sempach, but in whose breasts burned the fire of Leonidas at the pass,” said Captain Henry Jones of his brothers-in-arms in the 8th Regiment.¹⁰

With America on its way to becoming a melting pot, the Union army reflected the country’s increasing ethnic diversity. Lt. William Cogswell,¹¹ a Native American from Cornwall, fought in the 2nd Heavy Artillery, while a Hawaiian named Friday Kanaka enlisted in Connecticut’s 30th Regiment. Lt. Augustus Rodrigues of the 15th Connecticut came from Puerto Rico. A company of men in the 27th Regiment had names like Frederick Buchholz, Peter Schmidt, and Jacob Herman; nearly all of them born in Germany, or the children of German immigrants.

In fact, immigrants made up one-third of the Union army. In Connecticut’s 9th Regiment, which drew most of its soldiers from Irish families, the regimental flag bore an Irish harp beside the stars and stripes. Other regiments contained men born in a host of other nations—England, Poland, Italy, Spain—who risked, and often gave, their lives for their adopted country.

The 9th Connecticut, the “Irish Regiment,” served in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia. The 9th’s battle honors included the Battle of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, whose name was added to the colors proudly displayed by an unidentified sergeant. In addition to Rebel bullets, disease proved a grim enemy for the 9th. In one four-month period, 150 men died from sickness.

Born in China, Joseph Pierce came to Connecticut as a boy, brought by a ship captain from Berlin. Pierce lived with the captain’s family until 1862 when he enlisted in the 14th Connecticut. He earned his corporal’s stripes in the Fighting 14th, and survived the regiment’s many battles.

MOTIVATIONS

As the soldiers’ backgrounds varied, so did their reasons for fighting. At the beginning of the war, many men and boys enlisted in the wave of fervor sweeping the state. Joining the army in the Civil War—as now—also appealed to many young men who wanted to see something of the world beyond their hometown.

But thousands of men decided to fight out of true patriotism. Having endured nearly three years of war, Lt. Benjamin Wright of the 10th Regiment wrote to his wife in Greenwich: “there has got to be some hard fighting, a good many lives must be sacrificed, but I feel that the cause is worth all that it has or will cost. We shall be a better Nation for the ordeal through which we have passed. It will be settled so that we need have no fears that our children will have to settle it again. If we lay down our lives in such a cause we can have the satisfaction of knowing they were sacrificed in a good cause and for the good of the country.”¹²

Of course, among Connecticut’s thousands of soldiers, opinion varied hugely.

“We are all tired of the war the whole army we never shall whip them I believe,” wrote Henry Thompson, an East Haven oysterman in the 15th Regiment. “I look at it as a great slaughter of lives.”¹³

William VanDeursen of Middletown had the blood of patriots flowing in his veins, but he was clear about his own motivation: “Money was all I enlisted for, to get enough to pay of[f] some of our debts.”¹⁴

Besides his monthly pay, every man who enlisted received healthy enlistment bonuses from the state of Connecticut and the federal government. In addition, each city and town offered as high a bounty as possible in an effort to entice men to enlist from their town—and thus meet the quota of soldiers that the state had assigned it. Middletown began by offering $100 and increased it to $150 later in the war. Individual regiments and companies sometimes offered inducements as well.

While commissioned staff officers received much more than enlisted men, they had additional expenses; they had to buy their own food, and pay for their horses’ forage.

Union Army, White Soldiers’ Monthly Pay, 1862

William Walter VanDeursen’s father had been a captain in the War of 1812, and his grandfather had served in the Revolution. His forebears may have been patriots, but Willy joined the Union army for one reason: money.

The Hartford Daily Times, September 1, 1862

THE DRAFT

When bounties didn’t bring in enough men to win the war, the government moved to a draft. On March 3, 1863, Congress passed the Enrollment and Conscription Act, requiring males between the ages of twenty and forty-five to register for the draft. The act applied to both American citizens and immigrants who intended to become citizens. The threat of a draft brought plenty of opposition.

As the day of the draft approached, hundreds of men applied for medical exemptions. “The halt, the blind, the diseased, swelled to a fabulous number. Some surgeons seemed, from excessive good nature, or for the sake of popularity, or for the paltry twenty-five cents received for each certificate, inclined to grant almost every application.”¹⁶

In Middletown, a recruiting poster advised men to “Choose between the Large bounties or the chance of the draft!” Veteran soldiers—more valuable since they’d already been trained—could rake in $792 in bounties, while new recruits received $692 for enlisting.

Woodbury residents read an anonymous broadside posted in town that listed “certified cowards”: local men accused of faking medical conditions to avoid military service. Beside each man’s name was the disability he claimed. (Albert D. Atwood was probably not pleased to find his neighbors chortling over his “enlarged and diseased scrotum.”) Beside Frederick Boulton’s claim of a “stiffened shoulder, conjestion of lungs” was the editor’s note: “walks five miles daily to his labor, does over work in factory, can hold two Fifty-sixes [weights] at arms length.” The broadside further noted that many of the exemption certificates had been signed by Surgeon Beckwith of Litchfield, “since turned out of office.”

It was possible for men who did get drafted to avoid their military service if they had enough money. A drafted man (called a “conscript”) could pay $300 to the government, or hire a substitute soldier to go in his place.

Many substitutes used aliases, and after claiming their fee, deserted at the first opportunity. “A sweet lot of substitutes they send us,” wrote a disgusted Harry Goddard of the 14th Connecticut. “All New York roughs. Of the 380 who reached us, 92 have deserted, four have been shot, and I almost wish they would send them with or in their coffins.”¹⁷

Over 200,000 Union soldiers deserted during the war. Gilbert Smith of the 6th Connecticut described the ambivalence he and many others felt at deserters’ executions: “There was 2 men shot for desertion yesterday but I did not go to see them it is something I have a great dislike for but yet I think it serves them right.”¹⁸

Soon after the war began, businesses that supplied substitute soldiers opened in many cities. For a fee, the firms provided alternates for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t serve in the military. Some patriotic women, like sisters Elizabeth and Augusta Greene of Norwich, hired substitutes for themselves for the length of the war.

MANY WAYS TO SERVE

Connecticut provided the Union with over a score of Union generals, including Daniel Tyler, J. K. F. Mansfield, Alfred Terry, John Sedgwick, Alpheus Williams, Horatio Wright, Alexander Shaler, and Nathaniel Lyon.

Drafted men reported to this conscript camp in Grapevine Point, New Haven (now the site of Criscuolo Park). Here veteran officers did their best to turn them into fighting men. Most conscripts were reluctant soldiers at best; many were bounty jumpers, intent on escaping so they could enlist elsewhere for the bounty money. To prevent desertions, security at the conscript camp was tight, but that didn’t stop the most determined conscripts. In January of 1865, an officer reported that “the denizens of the guard-house had tunnelled out during the night, and all who cared to go, twenty-six in number, had left for parts unknown.” (George B. Peck, Jr., Camp & Hospital, pp. 16–17.)

Beneath these lofty leaders, Connecticut men filled a huge range of positions that included clerks, commissaries, wagoners, musicians, hospital stewards, and chaplains, each with its own vital function. Soldiers who weren’t fighting men were still crucial to the cause. When a regiment marched eighty miles in three days, it needed a competent commissary who would have rations waiting for the hungry soldiers. Without that commissary, everything broke down.

MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD

“Fighting” men were often contemptuous of the soldiers who wielded pens rather than muskets. Clerks usually avoided combat, but their duties were demanding. Eddie Brewer, a clerk in the 14th Connecticut, wrote: “Out of seventeen days we have been at Harper’s Ferry, there have been but five when I could find time to cook my regular meals, and I have often been under the necessity of getting along with one meal, and several times have written until after eleven o’clock at night.”¹⁹

TRUE MORAL COURAGE

A post in the Ambulance Corps was also considered a soft job by other soldiers. “I think I would go [into the Ambulance Corps] if I could get a chance to in a moment,” wrote Lucius Bidwell of Middletown; “the dutys are not so hard for thay have no drilling nor fighting to trouble them.”²⁰

For the army clerk, the writing never stopped. Among the constant forms he filled out was the daily countersign, which soldiers needed in order to pass the picket line. Eddie Brewer noted that he made seven copies of the document each day. In September of 1863, Colonel Upham of the 15th Regiment opened this document, folded in a neat triangle, to learn the day’s password: “Petersburg.”

Eddie Brewer (left), a bank clerk in Middletown, enlisted in the 14th Connecticut along with his best friend, Amos Fairchild. Close as brothers, the two young men were comrades until Eddie was pulled from the ranks and assigned to be a clerk at Gen. French’s headquarters. While Eddie wrote orders, his friend Amos went into battle with the regiment. Though being a clerk was considered a safe position by those in combat, Eddie and Amos met exactly the same fate: they died of disease in the army.

But John G. Pelton vehemently refuted Bidwell’s impression of the Ambulance Corps. Like Bidwell, John Pelton had joined the 14th Connecticut in 1862. In the months that followed, his regiment would fight in one major battle after another. (“How I have escaped being killed … is a mystery to me,” Pelton wrote to his brother.)²¹

But Pelton’s familiarity with battle would prove invaluable. In April of 1864 he became ambulance chief for the Army of the Potomac’s 2nd Corps. Three weeks later, Pelton had his baptism by fire: the battles of May 1864 resulted in over 36,000 Union casualties.

Pelton demanded courage, competence, and sympathy from the hundreds of stretcher-bearers and ambulance drivers he commanded. One of his officers, John Harpster, described the duties that Pelton laid out for his men during battle:

We were to keep in the rear of the Army, but, as he significantly pointed out, not too far in the rear! The stretcher bearers were to be allowed to take shelter, provided they did not have to hunt too far from the line for it; otherwise they were to take what came, just as the men on the front line had to; for they were in error, he said, if they thought their office was to carry with it any special immunity from danger … The wounded were to be removed beyond the line of fire as quickly and as carefully as possible, put into the ambulances and removed to the field hospital …

The drivers, during battle … were to keep the two water kegs in their ambulances constantly replenished, and were to be ready to move the instant a wounded man was delivered to their charge. They were to drive carefully, taking every precaution against causing the wounded unnecessary suffering, and, having delivered their charge at the field hospital, were to return to the front as rapidly as possible.²²

Pelton was proud of his men, writing that “it requires more true moral courage to advance up to a line of Battle unarmed and unsupported than it does to charge in line nerved by the presence of officers and the excitement of battle.”²³ His official reports listed scores of ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers who were killed, wounded, or captured while performing their duties.

Harpster added that “There is another test of the stuff a man is made of to which the ambulance men are put … to take a train load of mangled and mutilated men back to the field hospital and, having delivered your charge, stand a while watching the surgeons cutting and sawing at human bodies, and see the holes dug at the foot of the amputating tables gradually filling up with dissevered arms and legs, and then, with the horror of it all before your eyes … approach again that fatal line of fire … this, I say, will be conceded to be a pretty stiff test of the amount of iron that is in the blood of a man.”²⁴

Once a battle was over, Pelton’s men were not allowed to rest, of course. They were searching the battlefields for wounded, then hurrying their ambulances along clogged roads to reach field hospitals. They often spent all night tending to the wounded; then turned to the care of their horses and mules before they could sleep.

John Graves Pelton was twenty-four when he enlisted for the Union. An intelligent man with a good sense of humor, Pelton quickly became adept at running the ambulance corps. In the spring of 1864, with battle an almost daily occurrence, Pelton smoothly transferred ambulances and personnel from battlefield to battlefield, providing wounded soldiers with swifter, more humane care.

A DUTY TO INSPIRE

In a fight to the death, there was even a place for ministers. For Henry Clay Trumbull, chaplain of Connecticut’s 10th Regiment, that place was on the battle line.

A chaplain’s job was what he made of it: some limited themselves to holding Sunday services and passing out religious tracts to the soldiers. For his part, Trumbull saw with clarity that a successful chaplain had to be willing to risk his life alongside the men.

Every soldier must be ready to meet danger or death, and, if he failed in that supreme test of a soldier in time of war, he was every way a failure. A chaplain had a duty to inspire men for their service for their country. If he was himself a coward, or deemed unready to face a soldier’s perils, no words from him could have weight with his men. If, on the other hand, their chaplain shared their dangers bravely, his men gave him more than full credit for his courage and fidelity, and were the readier to do their duty under his direct appeals.²⁵

In combat, Trumbull took charge of his regiment’s wounded, supervising their removal to field hospitals and making certain they were cared for. His calm attention as the bullets flew gave the soldiers confidence.

In August of 1864, the 10th Connecticut found itself in a desperate fight in Deep Bottom, Virginia. Trumbull’s friend and comrade, Henry Ward Camp, painted a droll image of the chaplain’s composure under fire:

the ground held by our advance was swept by a cross-fire against which no ordinary cover afforded security. Word came from the skirmish-line that Captain White was wounded seriously, it was feared mortally. Henry saw to his being carried back to the hospital … In a short time Henry returned … With thoughtful kindness, he brought for us a huge watermelon. It was speedily cut and divided; General Foster very glad to get his share. What could have been more refreshing under fire? Before it was finished, orders were given for our regiment to swing around, fronting the left, and covering the flank, upon which an attack was momentarily expected. It was comical enough to see officers forming their men, enforcing their orders with brandished slices of melon, and taking a bite between each command.²⁶

A FIGHTING FORCE

As the war progressed, most of the Connecticut troops—whether they started as ministers, farmers, or pastry chefs—developed into competent soldiers, each filling a role. The citizen soldiers who had never held a gun or marched a mile would become a fighting force that left a record of honor on battlefields throughout the South.

Musicians assigned to be stretcher-bearers in battle wore strips of green cloth on their hats to identify their jobs. “The green band around their caps,” John Pelton told them, “would secure them against being laid hold of for other duty … but the green band and the white feather [traditionally symbolizing cowardice], they must understand, must by no means be construed as meaning the same thing.” (Capt. J. H. Harpster, “The Ambulance Officer’s Story,” in The Story of Our Regiment: A History of the 148th Pennsylvania Volunteers, edited by Joseph Wendell Muffly, p. 290.)